Gandhian Philosophy and Indian Festivals: A Pathway to Social Harmony

Abstract

In this article, the Indian festivals are reconfigured to form political-ethical spaces where the collective effervescence may either cement solidarity of pluralist or re-focused into competitive religiosity, conspicuous consumption and exclusion. Reconciling Durkheimian sociology of liminality with the Gandhian theory of moral politics, it further develops a model of Festo Sarvodaya where the energy of the festival is normatively regulated by Satya and Ahimsa and is actually implemented in the Constructive Programme. It starts by defining the ontological parameters of a Gandhian festival before dissenting to present day festival political economy via Swadeshi and Trusteeship with regard to collective ecological and social perniciousness of spectacle marketization. Three case lenses: Deepavali, Eid-ul-Fi, and Raksha Bandhan flash mob action examples in the forms of redistribution and low-carbon ritual redesign, interfaith service based on zakat and shared labour, and civic covenants redesigning protection into reciprocal dignity. According to the article, the key in transforming recurring celebrations into schools of democracy, habituation to self-limitation, fraternity, and care towards the last can be achieved through festival governance, inclusive budgeting and joint public service. It ends with a plan of an empirical agenda of testing these assertions in an ethnographic manner at localities. Ideally, it uses Gandhi as a model and thus is not able to reflect regional and caste differentiation.